The Start Of The 2019 Tour De Fleece

As I posted last week, our team captain this year is Maisie.  She's let it go to her head just a little, but so far, so good...unless something has happened late today and I haven't heard yet.  I happen to have a small sheep in my "inside flock" that reminds me of Maisie, so I've picked her to be my spinning mascot.

She's wearing a warm jacket because I have turned the air conditioner in the Wool House on high :-o.

I'm spinning something pretty neat this year.  17 years ago, when I was just getting started with our wool flock, we were gifted five Jacob sheep from a kind shepherdess in Indiana.  I really didn't know what to do with So Much Wool (hahahahaha), so I had some processed into roving and some into quilt batts.  

I think I must have divided up the black and white wools because I remember having some light gray batts and one dark one that I kept for myself in hopes I could find someone to make a real quilt from our barn quilt. Sigh...

You know...I thought this spring...rather than just sitting in the loft, that dark batt could be re-run as roving.  Roving from our very first five Jacob sheep.  Wouldn't that be neat?  Like an historical do-over now that I'm a better spinner...and those sheep are no longer with us.

This year for the Tour I'm spinning Elizabeth, Esther, Jester, Joshua and Jacob :-).  There are 2.5 pounds of dark gray roving.  I'd like to spin all of that, but I'm off to a slow start, so I may not be able to reach that goal...but I'm going to try.

So what is Mini Maisie looking at in the picture above?

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Posting this here so I can post it to the blog. It will all make more sense in a bit 😉. #tdf2019 #jacobsheep

A post shared by Sara Dunham (@thecrazysheeplady) on Jul 7, 2019 at 7:03pm PDT

The legacy of those five Jacobs :-).

And we're off!

Full House

If you are following my Instagram feed, you probably did wonder what on earth we were up to last night.

"What are you doing over there?" Andy

A post shared by Sara Dunham (@thecrazysheeplady) on Aug 2, 2017 at 5:58pm PDT

Andy reminds me so much of Graham Lamb...which is why I am set up on the outside of the gate 😉. What AM I doing?

A post shared by Sara Dunham (@thecrazysheeplady) on Aug 2, 2017 at 5:59pm PDT

Remember the barn quilt bats?  They set up camp behind the barn quilt again this spring, but about a month ago I stopped seeing bat droppings on the ground and I was afraid we'd lost them all.  There were never very many and bats are really struggling these days :-/.

I was very happy and relieved to still see a couple bats leaving the barn in the days to follow.  I tried to poke around to see if I could figure out where they'd moved, but had no luck.  I didn't worry too much about it though.  I was just happy they were still here, alive and well.

When the weather turned so hot and humid that I was locking the sheep out of the barn in the late afternoon to force them into the shade (the sun beats down on the outer shed) and give the barn a chance to dry out, I'd sit behind the barn with them for awhile at night before I let them back in.

Right as it got dark, whoosh whoosh whoosh...  So that's where the bats were living!  I again poked around the back part of the barn, but couldn't find them.  Were they in the rafters?  Under the eaves? I still couldn't find them, the sneaky little bats, but I was on to them ;-).

Last week I happened upon some tell tale signs of bats, guano.  I'd come around the back corner of the barn and noticed it on the gate for the last stall on the horse side of the barn.  Huh.  Right under the bat house.  How about that.

My brother gave us that bat house (five or six?) years ago.  No one had ever used it.  We didn't have any other suitable locations to try moving it to, so we'd just left it.  After all these years, it was now occupied.  And not by just a couple bats!

I took this video last night.  Tim noticed one bat flying from the front of the barn over to the bat house and then everyone started leaving the house.  We are wondering if that was an adult waking all the kids up?

How many can you count?  Leave your number in the comments and we'll have a drawing for one of the new drawstring bags.  The bats aren't named, but we can be thankful that they are keeping so many bugs away from all the named sheep :-).

Here is a shorter, closer up video from the night before.  Isn't this cool?

After everyone cleared out and was safely off to work, Saint Tim got to work installing a second bat house.  He put it next to the original house, about 12" away.  I'm a bit worried that it is too close, but he had to work around a tobacco vent.  

I've emailed a bat conservation group to check.  Hopefully he won't have to go back up and move it although he did say he was less scared of heights when it was too dark to see how far he might fall ;-).  Reason #1694 for why we call him Saint Tim!

The Batty Sheep Lady

I've been noticing a row of black "rice" at the barn entrance.  Seemed an odd place for mice so I googled bat poop and sure enough, our bats are back :-D.

They are definitely living behind the barn quilt.  I saw three leave the other night at 9:25.  They whoosh, whoosh, whooshed out from the bottom at Top Speed.  Just fascinating!  I'd love to catch a video of that, but it's too dark.  Hopefully there are more than three, but three is better than none if not.  

Bullwinkle and I camped out in the barn last night.  Blossom aka BaBa has pretty willingly volunteered to be the auntie again this year.  We all had some vanilla wafers (probably her main motivation ;-) before bed and it all went pretty well.  The end is near :'-(.

What To Do About The Beloved Barn Quilt, I Mean Bat House

In giving folks directions to our farm, I always say "Look for the big black tobacco barn with a barn quilt."  Now it's a barely black barn and the barn quilt is starting to disintegrate :-(.  It used to be just me and Saint Tim discussing the situation.  Now everyone asks about it.

While it may seem rude to think of friends, family, and yes, complete strangers ragging on a quilt hanging on someone else's barn, it's actually more of a curiosity than a complaint.  The bottom of the quilt is 40' in the air.  Yes, what ARE we going to do?

We hired a tree service with a huge bucket truck to hang it in September of 2007.  It was a big job. He'd have to come back out to take it down.  I'd have to re-paint a new quilt and that was a big job as well.  We'd have to coordinate all that with getting the barn re-painted, which is...another big job. And then we have to hire Mr. Clifford to come back out to hang the new quilt. And then the plot thickens.

The other morning, dark and early, the day we dyed Renny's wool, I was up at the barn dividing her fleece and setting out what amounts I wanted to dye.  Around 6:00 I noticed some swooping and fluttering out front and some weird chirping noises.  The bats!

We've hosted a (sadly) very small bat community since we've lived here.  At best count the most bats we've had is probably five.  For the last couple of years I've only regularly seen two I think. I've assumed they lived in the barn, but I've never seen them or any signs.

The curiosity has been killing me and here they were, flying in after a busy night!  I quick stepped it out into the driveway to watch.  They swooped and rose and swooped and circled in front of me. Definitely more than two but they were so quick I couldn't keep track. Then one would whoosh and disappear.  More swooping and then whoosh, another gone.  Where were they going?

Up under the barn quilt!  No wonder they weren't using the bat house we'd hung on the side of the barn.  They were already installed in the barn quilt bat house out front.  Now I definitely don't want to take the quilt down and I'm leery of even painting the front of the barn.  I need to get up with the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife to see if they can figure out what kind of bats we have and if they will migrate for the winter.  Until then, we're just going to stay shabby.

Of course, now I'm obsessed with seeing the bats come in and out.  I haven't made any more pre-dawn trips to the barn, but I know I will.  First I wanted to see them fly out!  I set myself up the other night with a concrete block chair on the utility trailer aka spaceship.  Camera at the ready. And I waited.

While I waited, here's the back field before the hay was cut.  Complete with the all too familiar thunderheads building.

Graham and Daniel through the barn portal.  I took some pictures of Liddy and Blossom and Lila through the new shop windows portal, but they were pretty uninspiring.  

So I waited.  And the sun set.  Notice the difference in light between the first and last pictures? And I waited some more, watching very carefully.  And then all the bats were flying around and I didn't see a single one come out.  The end.  

The Story That Might Have Been

After it became clear that we were not going to have much luck getting the power company to help hang our painted barn quilt square (remember from a couple of months ago?), we started looking for other options. After not getting too far along those routes, we started thinking about hanging it ourselves. The story that might have been - think ropes and chains and pulleys, hooking the 300+ pound quilt square to the tractor and Tim up on a 40' extension ladder with power tools. Probably would have been a classic...or at least a good Vonage commercial (cue woohoohoo music).


Thankfully Clifford Tree Service came to the rescue. Don't get me wrong, even with the proper truck and equipment it was still a big job. Fitting it between the roof and the dusk-to-dawn light was a game of mere inches. Ben Clifford did an outstanding job and even went to the trouble of touching up the paint so that the lag screws didn't show. I can't thank him or recommend him enough.

Interestingly, within about 15 minutes of the truck pulling out, a hummingbird flew in to have a look. I was on the phone with Tim and his first thought was that the bright colors brought him in (this is most likely the correct answer). My first thought was that the hummingbird was probably angry (or worse, seriously disappointed) that there wasn't a hummingbird included in the design.


Hmmm, maybe I should get that ladder out...

Barn Quilt

There are painted quilt squares popping up on barns all over the central United States. We have several now in Harrison County and Equinox Farm has just added to the "Clothesline". It still needs to be sealed, so it's not quite ready to hang (the local power company is handling that, thank goodness), but the painting part is finished and I wanted to share.

The appliqued design was inspired by our native plant pond, aka The Frog Pond, which is surrounded by goldenrod (our state flower), iron weed, joe pye weed, cattails, sedges, cardinal flower, purple coneflower and brown eyed susans. There are many more native plants around the actual pond, but those are some of our favorites and lent themselves well to the design. We included a frog (naturally) and a viceroy butterfly (our state butterfly) and a honey bee, as those are some of the many gifts that native plants bring.

Ewenice was good company. Ewen got fired his second day on the job. Apparently painting itself is not nearly as fun as destroying the painting supplies. He was pretty cute with white (primer) lipstick, but cute only gets you so far.